Title: Siiri ja kauhea kummitus [Siiri and the gruesome ghost]

☺The student’s conclusion: Expands traditional gender norms

The book’s main character is a small girl called Siiri, who has three friends called Pikku-Otto, Keski-Otto and Iso-Otto (Little Otto, Medium-Sized Otto and Big Otto). Siiri also has a small puppy, called Hunskeli. Secondary characters are Pikku-Otto’s mother and Siiri’s parents.

Siiri is a courageous little girl who is not in the least afraid of ghosts. The boys are really scared, especially Pikku-Otto. Even though Siiri behaves in a boyish manner, she is still dressed as a girl, just as all the females in this book: they are all dressed in tunics. The boys always wear hats, even when they are in bed or indoors, even though it is deemed to be bad manners to keep a hat on indoors. This shows that it is acceptable to wear a hat indoors – something youngsters do nowadays.

Siiri has no female friends in the book. I think that is because of her boyish manner. The boys like her because she is a girl who is quite at home in the company of boys and likes to play their games, even though boys and girls do not usually play together at this age. But what is unclear is how old Siiri and the boys are. I estimate that they are between five and eight. The group has no clear leader figure, but a certain hierarchy can be perceived: Pikku-Otto has the lowest status and is often called a chicken. However, being the lowest in the hierarchy can also be due to the fact that Pikku-Otto is the youngest and smallest of them all. Either Iso-Otto or Siiri has the highest status in the hierarchy, because they decide what they are all going to do together in the group. One example of this is when Iso-Otto gets an idea that the three of them should dress up as ghosts to scare Pikku-Otto, because he had scared them earlier by acting like a ghost.

The book contains no LGBT family, and the children grow up under “normal” conditions. But it does go against gender roles in that it shows that girls can be boyish, and that both boys and girls can play together.